From the Editor
Elsevier’s lawsuit against Meta is not about copyright. It is about power — specifically, whether a private corporation can claim ownership over scientific knowledge created with public dollars. If publishers succeed in blocking AI from accessing publicly funded research, they will succeed in blocking the public as well.
David E. Kingsley, PhD
Background
A recent Nature report revealed that Elsevier is suing Meta for using information from Elsevier‑published articles to train large language models (LLMs). The irony is glaring: nearly every issue of The Lancet, Cell, and other Elsevier journals is built on research funded by federal grants and conducted at taxpayer‑supported universities.
The public pays for the research.
The public pays again to read it.
And now Elsevier argues the public cannot use it to train the tools that help people understand science.
Analysis
AI systems like Copilot, Claude, and Gemini are becoming the public’s primary interface with scientific knowledge. Restricting them from learning from publicly funded research would create structurally incomplete AI — and a structurally misinformed public.
Elsevier’s claim to “own” scientific knowledge rests on a fiction: that a publisher acquires ownership of ideas simply by hosting them behind a paywall. The truth is the opposite. The scholarly publishing industry survives only because of:
- publicly funded research
- publicly funded universities
- publicly subsidized labor from researchers, reviewers, and editors
To assert ownership over the scientific record is to privatize a public good.
Implications
If Elsevier prevails:
- scientific knowledge becomes a private asset
- AI becomes less accurate and less useful
- the public loses access to the science it paid to create
- democratic oversight of research collapses into corporate control
This is not a fight about copyright. It is a fight about whether the scientific commons remains public — or becomes the property of a handful of corporations.
The public paid for this knowledge.
The public has a right to it.
And no private publisher should be allowed to wall it off.